Halloween is right around the corner, and I’m sure many of you are starting to make trick-or-treating plans. We want all walking dead and small creatures to be safe while crossing the streets or using the Metro system, so here are a few safety tips to follow to ensure your Halloween is scary for the right reasons:

How about safety tips for drivers? It’s their responsibility to avoid hitting vulnerable pedestrians, not the other way around.

1. Keep an eye out for pedestrians crossing the street.
2. Trick-or-treaters may be wearing dark costumes that make it harder to see them in a car. Drive carefully.
3. Obey all warning signs and signals.
4. Avoid distractions like electronic devices, pay attention to your surroundings.
5. Take special care at marked crosswalks. Remember that pedestrians have the right of way
6. Keep in mind that most trick-or-treaters are children who are having fun, not thinking about traffic safety. It is your responsibility to keep our children safe.

If these extremely basic safety tips really and truly offend you, then I will humbly suggest that maybe we’re the ones who actually care about pedestrian safety by daring — for lack of a better term — to offer some basic and common sense safety tips. Sure, motorists should be careful. And many are. But this is a night when a lot of Very Small People will be out and about and it seems to me some common sense advice is realistic and well intentioned. If you take offense at everything that doesn’t indict motorists, then I think you will have a hard time accomplishing many of the very worthy things that Streetsblog has been fighting for — for a very long time now.

Anna and Steve, I completely understand the “just trying to help” point, but I fear that it is ineffective. The traditional approach of optimizing for vehicle convenience while transferring the safety burden to pedestrians has led us to a public health epidemic where motor vehicle collisions are the leading cause of death for children. While it may feel like common sense to tell people to be careful, use crosswalks, dress in bright colors, etc…the data suggest that restricting the message in this way isn’t really helping.

I side with those who favor a more balanced approach. It is fine to call for defensive walking, but what will really make a difference is raising social expectations for safe driving. Halloween is a great night to start.

It may be sensitive, but it’s reasonable to wonder why a representative of Metro, a taxpayer funded organization that never wastes a chance to highlight it’s transformative work in transportation, would spend time presenting the status quo in an advisory bulletin. Is everyone at Metro on the same page on what our goal is? This is not just about infrastructure; there’s a culture that needs to change also if we are to ever accomplish what our ballot measure envision.